Erin Evans - The Adversary

Havilar stared at the box, at once wanting to drop down on the ground and tear through it, and wanting to throw it away, so that it couldn’t taunt her. She settled for cradling it in her arms, wondering what was inside. What Brin had thought important enough to save. What Brin had been so eager to return.

“Are you married?” she blurted.

He laughed, maybe nervously. “No.”

Was that a stupid thing to ask? She didn’t know. It seemed like every scrap of confidence she’d earned and gathered and prized was gone. She couldn’t use her glaive, she couldn’t talk to Brin, she couldn’t do anything.

He looked so different and still so much like her Brin. She wanted so much to hold him tight again, to kiss him through that stupid beard. But he made no move to come any nearer to her. Too much had changed.

“Are you staying long?” she asked.

He shook his head. “No, I can’t. I probably shouldn’t have left Cormyr, only, well, I couldn’t not come.” He was quiet a moment, while she stared at the sand. “Havi, I’m really glad you’re alive.”

“I have to go,” she said. It was too much. She wasn’t going to be the silly girl who said all the wrong things, not with him. Glaive in hand, box on her hip, she hurried past him, tears rising in her eyes.

She passed the entrance to the cellar and grabbed one of the bottles of wine sitting there, waiting to be ordered. After all, she thought, heading up the stairs, it wasn’t as if she were a child. It wasn’t as if Mehen or anyone else could stop her.

She was nearly to her room, at the top of the stairs, when she passed the little library the Harpers kept. The doors were open and Farideh sat on the floor, several books open around her. Reading, Havilar thought, as if nothing were wrong.

Farideh looked up and in her expression was all the fear and contrition Havilar didn’t want to see. “Havi-”

“You were right,” Havilar said, shaking, she was so angry. “It didn’t last. It didn’t even get a chance, because you had to get in the way, thinking you’re the only one who knows how to fix a karshoji thing, and ruin my entire life just to stop something that you didn’t even stop! Are you happy?”

Tears brimmed her sister’s eyes, and Farideh looked away. “I’m sorry. Havi, I’m so-”

“Shut up,” Havilar said. “Shut up. I was on your side when they kicked you out of the village, I was on your side when you decided to go racing around Neverwinter, I was even on your side when you wanted to go down in that crypt and nearly got us both killed, but I am not on your side now, and I’m never going to be on your side again.”

Havilar didn’t wait for Farideh to respond-there wasn’t a thing she could say that Havilar wanted to hear. She turned on her heel and, toting her glaive and box and the bottle of wine, went up to her room.

Door shut firmly behind her, Havilar pulled the cork from the bottle with her teeth and considered the box thrown onto the bed. Give it to Farideh, she thought, make her sort it out. She took a heavy swig of the wine, flinching at its dryness. But she wasn’t going back out-not for better wine and not for Farideh. She drank more, enough to warm her belly, and sat on the bed, the box in her lap.

“It’s just a box,” she told herself.

It was emptier than she’d expected. A stack of yellowed chapbooks. A stylus. A bottle of ink, long dried up. Stiff strips of leather for tying her braids. Farideh’s little dagger, spotted with rust. A bright red feather she’d found and stuck in her braid for a day or two. Squares of cloth snipped off her old clothes-she rubbed a piece of her cloak between two fingers. It was softer than she’d remembered. She set them aside and found, pooled in the bottom, a chain of silver.

She drew it out-Farideh’s amulet of Selûne. The one that bound devils.

Havilar took another gulp of wine, squeezing the chain hard enough to hurt her palm. A single word-that’s all it would have taken and she could have stopped that Sairché. But Farideh wasn’t wearing the amulet then, because Lorcan had told her not to. Henish, Havilar thought, and drank more wine.

She slipped the necklace on, over one horn and then the other. Karshoj to Farideh, if it had been Havilar that stupid Sairché wanted, she could have stopped all of it-with the amulet or with a spell or with her blade. She rubbed her thumb over the spiral carved into the back of the amulet, and imagined taking her glaive to Sairché the way she had the dummy.

Havilar took another gulp of wine, and considered the amulet again-it would make things even easier to fix, if Sairché came back again. Because if anyone was going to fix this, it would have to be Havilar, and it would have to wait for tomorrow.

Every tome and scroll in Tam’s library that so much as hinted at referencing devils or the Nine Hells lay open on the floor around Farideh. She’d even pulled down what seemed to be a chapbook in a memoir’s skin about traveling backward through time, just in case.

But all she could think about was Havilar saying, “I’m never going to be on your side again.”

Footsteps made her look up, and there was Brin, staring down the hall where Havilar had disappeared, holding a book under one arm. Farideh shut her eyes-so that was what made Havilar finally talk to her again.

“Well met,” she said. He looked over at her, surprised, but said nothing. “Or not,” she added, wishing she’d said nothing at all. “That’s all right.” She cleared her throat. “I’m sorry, Brin. I didn’t-”

“Of course you didn’t,” he interrupted. “You’re not a monster.” But he still wouldn’t look her in the eye. He held the book out to her. “Here. It didn’t fit in the box.”

Farideh took it from him-a thick tome bound in dark blue silk, smudged with dirt and marks of damp. Her ritual book. She leafed through it, skipping the first few pages instinctively, turning to the spells she’d written in herself, sitting in the back of a cart lumbering along the path between the Nether Mountains and Everlund. Havi and Brin trailing the cart, hand in hand, heads together. Dahl explaining how the components of the ritual fit together, rambling on and on, caught up in his own love of the magic more than any love of teaching her. Human-shaped Lorcan, sitting on the back of the driver’s box, close enough for Tam to bless him back into the Hells, and watching everything.

She closed the book and held it to her chest.

“You should have taken me too,” Brin said quietly.

Farideh looked down at the book beside her, the grotesque woodcut of a grinning devil that leered up at her. “I would have. If I’d known what would happen. You have to believe that.”

“So you say,” he replied, his voice too full of pain and anger to bear. “But I don’t.” She watched him turn and go, wishing she knew what to say, what to do.

You can fix this, she told herself. You have to fix this. She set the ritual book beside her and went back to her studies, skimming pages full of advice it was too late to take.

A wind came from nowhere, rustling the pages of the book. A wind out of the Hells themselves.

“Are you ready?”

Farideh did not turn to look at Sairché, did not give her the satisfaction of seeing the fear that no doubt raced across her features.

“You ask that as if I have a choice in the matter,” she said quietly. “If I say ‘no,’ will you give me time?”

“Don’t sneer at my courtesy,” Sairché said. “You might find you still need it.” Sairché’s robes swished as she circled around Farideh. “Have you found a way around our deal?”